


Actual Reality

by DWEmma



Category: Alice In Wonderland - Lewis Carroll, Rent - Larson
Genre: Collection: Purimgifts Day 3, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-10
Updated: 2015-02-10
Packaged: 2018-03-11 14:13:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,034
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3329258
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DWEmma/pseuds/DWEmma
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Collins' final days at MIT, pursued by his evil homophobic ad-vizier. Okay, this one was a stretch. That's why it's the third day. I just couldn't let this plot bunny go and the guy hates him because he's gay, so it's valid... Also there's the Cheshire Cat, or maybe he shouldn't be taking so many club drugs.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Actual Reality

**Author's Note:**

  * For [natapa](https://archiveofourown.org/users/natapa/gifts).



MIT was the dream, right? MIT, Boston, not New York, away from his friends, away from The Bronx of his childhood, away from the Lower East Side of his broke early adulthood, MIT up from Queens University. A PhD, which no other brother he knew had even dreamed of, and he was on his way. 

Virtual Reality was the dream. Drugs without the drugs. Big helmets with a world in them, imagine a world, imagine a better world and put it on your head, and then maybe when you put it on your head and saw it, you’d take it off and work to make it real. Or put it on and see what it’s like in other parts of the world, worse parts, dangerous parts, see what it really is to be someone else and you take it off and you’ve got empathy. Falling down that hole into Realityland. 

But his advisor didn’t see it that way. The dream of those helmets, those pixels that didn’t look like anything but a Monet of what it was meant to be, was about escape for Dr. Dodgson. Was nothing more than a way out of reality, a way out of life. A virtual unreality. Commercial success. That games had to be fun and that was all they could be. Dr. Dodgson didn’t see the potential for games to be a tool to create empathy. He thought all of that was "faggot stuff." Sentimental drivel for women and other sensitives. 

And yes, there were ways to let down after all the stress. Well of course there was that way, but sometimes ManRay wasn’t full of the right men, the ones who wanted some proper Chocolate loving. And he would never pay for it. His hand was better than resorting to that. But the boys who weren’t selling something he wouldn’t buy were selling something he would. 

And the fascinating biochemical cocktails they had to offer, new blends every week, were the only kind of escapist virtual reality that interested Collins. 

But not for the escape. It was for the ideas. Those chemicals blended with his brain chemicals and resulted in sweet sweet code. He found himself facing that C prompt awash in glowing colored lights, creating things that raised the hackles on the back of Dr. Dodgson’ neck, that were something of a lasting foundation. 

MIT was the dream, but the balance was between creating something real and lasting, something that would change the world into a better place, and keeping his advisor from kicking his ass back to the streets of New York, to the mercy of his friends. Because he needed those TA paychecks to fund his East Boston basement apartment, keep him in electricity, keep him in pills. 

And the visions didn’t come easy. They didn’t always arrive nice and pretty. Sometimes they talked back. Sometimes they weren’t friendly or giving. Sometimes that damn cat was there, smiling down at him from the tiny windows that looked out to street level, sometimes leaving behind just the smile, laughing at him, telling him that both ways are correct if he doesn’t know where he’s going. But he does know where he’s going. He’ll finish the damn experiment and prove that Actual Reality is a viable operation. He’ll build a game that people will want to play that will show them the worst of humanity and the best of humanity, put it right in that helmet, right on their faces, and when they step out they’ll be changed. 

But sometimes after the drugs wear off, sometimes that cat will show up just the same. He’ll find the smile somehow randomly dropped into his code in ASCII. Just the damn smile. A smile without a cat. It’s not in there doing anything. It’s just dead code, nonconforming and nonstandard, but everything functions fine around it. But laughing at him. Showing up when Dr. Dodgson comes in to look over his shoulder, not there before, making it seem like he’s going crazy. Being asked why he’s not working on furthering the processes, helping improve the technology so that more colors can be used, that smaller pixels can smooth the look of the world, being asked why he insists on trying to create “hippie bullshit” on a million dollar technological concept. “No one wants games that teach them things, that make them think. People just want to have a good time when they play games.” 

But the problem with Collins’ idea wasn’t the concept. It wasn’t that no one wanted a game like his. It was that his ideas were too far ahead of the technology available. That you can’t use visible pixels to create an understanding about the worst parts of the world. That the fact that things didn’t look real made it impossible to have empathy. And that he didn’t know what the best part of the world would be. He didn’t know how to create a world to aspire to, and certainly couldn’t program it. So all the tests failed. People found the games artificial and fake. 

And when Dr. Dodgson was telling him that unless he changed his experiment, unless he pursued something more in line with the research that he, himself was working on, that he’d let him go. Knowing that he was the only professor at MIT who was working on anything remotely similar to Actual Reality. The damn cat appeared on Dodgson’s face, his smile taking over the man’s frown. "And no more faggot empathy bullshit," he said. Or was it the cat who said that? 

When he explained to his friends why he was back in town, why he was back with an adjunct position at NYU, no real plans, no place to live, he said he was expelled for the theory of Actual Reality. In fact, he was merely told by his advisor that he no longer had a place with him. He was not, in fact, expelled for any of that. 

But when he punched that damn cat in the face, that evil taunting son of a bitch went down. And Dodgson went down with him. And punching a professor in the face…that can get you expelled.


End file.
